Recent times have witnessed the wide spread of the Internet, not only for professional purpose, but also at home. Consumers are offered more and more home electronic devices equipped with Internet connect capabilities, such as digital subscriber line (DSL) modems, residential gateways (RGW), set-top boxes (STB) for digital television (DTV), Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) terminal adapters, etc. Such devices are commonly called “home devices” or “customer premise equipment” (CPE) and are linked together to form a local area or home network (LAN) connected to a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet.
CPEs have become such advanced devices that it has become almost impossible for the average user to undertake any configuration change, firmware upgrade, backup, restore, troubleshooting or other management operations without the help of a skilled technician.
Few years ago, network operators used to send technicians to the customers' premises for support (so-called “truck rolls”). However, they are now trying to save costs by reducing truck rolls. This is why many remote management solutions for CPEs have been proposed in the near past.
Management policies are disclosed in “CPE WAN Management Protocol”, a technical report from the DSL Forum TR-069, produced by the DSL Home-Technical Working Group in 2004.
Remote management/control methods are disclosed in US patent applications no. 2006/0168178 (Hwang), 2005/0038875 (Park) and 2004/0010327 (Terashima).
Yet, there is still a need for improving the remote management of CPEs, allowing network operators to be capable of managing large numbers of CPEs in a fully automated manner.